Turbo.264 HD

Macs are known to work wonders when it comes to efficiency and speed, but yet there are some specific tasks that seem to last more than we have ever expected as it is with the case of encoding and converting video. Elgato, the world’s leading TV solution for the Mac which produces TV recording software and a complete range of TV tuners to record and edit TV and HD TV on the Mac, has come up two years ago with a tool called Turbo.264 a USB device that managed to do some encoding for Quick Time video.

This year Elgado has released the Intel-only $150 Turbo.264 HD, which like its sibling is meant to speed up video encoding. Moreover the device is able to confer speeding in the process of converting video directly from AVCHD HD camcorders, enables you to trim video clips before converting them, you can also combine several clips into a single one, and in addition can output video to HD formats including YouTube HD, 720p, and 1080p, not to mention that it works faster on slow and more-powerful Macs as well. To check its capabilities the device was tested on a current 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mac mini (with 4GB of RAM) and on an older 2 x 2.66GHz Dual Core Mac Pro (with 8GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT graphics card).

After running the two tests (the first one by using RipIt to convert a DVD movie to Video TS folder of which the main feature was converted to a single Apple TV compatible movie by the aid of Turbo.264 HD, and the second one using HandBrake to convert the Video TS folder again, this time without Turbo.264 HD) it was noticed that the device performed good in regard to speed (it took 36 minutes and 13 seconds) on both Mac mini and Mac Pro. To pull a movie clip from AVCHD camcorder and to convert it to Apple TV – friendly format the Turbo.264 HD performed also a great job, being able to do the conversion in only 9 minutes and 29 seconds.

But unfortunately to all these good things you have to pay a price – the image quality; comparing the videos created with Handbrake and the ones made with Turbo.264 HD application, one could notice the videos belonging to Turbo device displayed a poorer quality in regard to the image. Though this application provides the option to create settings customizing, there are some issues here: first of all some Mac users may not be that familiar with the data rate setting or even to effectively tweak an overscan, secondly even if you know-how, tweaking those settings you can meet the situation where the results won’t be able to play on the planned device, for instance if you set a video’s data range too high and Apple TV will not be able to play it. Next to this fact there were moments when the software failed to recognize that the device was plugged in but at a re-plugging the problem could be solved. Although one encounters these issues, it is recommended to own a Turbo.264 HD a valuable addition to your computing needs, especially when you use a slower Mac.